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PARIS CAFES 

   "The hours I have spent in cafes are the only ones I call living, apart from writing."
- Anais Nin     

Because of the hours spent writing in cafes, each writer develops a loyalty for and an identification with a particular cafe. It is easier to change one's religion than one's cafe. Even if you do not know where a friend lives, you always know his cafe. A few writers-such as poet Paul Fort at the Closerie des Lilas or Sartre at the Select­were kings who held court over constantly changing vassals.
Other writers use several cafes. Apollinaire, the charismatic poet who lived only 38 years, lunched at La Palette, took coffee at the Flore, and never missed Paul Fort's Tuesday meetings at the Closerie des Lilas during the first decade of this century. For some writers, working and meeting friends in a cafe, where alcohol is an inevitable attraction, led to ruin. Paul Verlaine, lyric vagabond poet of the 19th century, spent his life in cafes drinking the poisonous absinthe and wandering drunkenly from hospital to prison in deteriorating health until he died alone and wretched.

In addition to serving the valuable function of studio and office, cafes are centers for the dissemination of gossip. Ernest Hemingway, himself a newspaperman, said that the cafes of Montparnasse "anticipated the columnist as the daily substitute for immortality." Leon-Paul Fargue, the poet of Paris, earlier said the same thing about the St-Germain-des-Pres cafes:

If during the day there is a meeting of the French Cabinet, a boxing match in New jersey, a grand prize for conformists, a literary splash, a celebrity contest on the Right Bank or a shouting match, cafe-goers of Place St-Germain-des-Pres are the first to hear the results of these encounters and competitions .... [Here] one feels the most up to date, the closest to real events, to the people who know the real truths about the nations, the world and art.

He particularly liked Lipp, where "for the price of a beer, you can get a complete rundown on the day's happenings in Paris."
Not surprisingly, the modern newspaper has its roots in the 17th-century coffee houses of London-social centers which Addison visited to sample public opinion for the Spectator.

So great a Universitie
I think there ne'er was any
In which you may a scholar be For spending of a Penny
-News from a Coffee-House (English broadside of 1677)
In French cafes, newspapers have traditionally been available, and the newswriters themselves gather there to collect and disseminate information. Emile Zola wrote his great essay, "['accuse," an indictment of the French government's handling of the Dreyfus affair, at a table in Durand's. "J'accuse" was published in L'Aurore, and the next day the paper was mounted on wooden rods and read at every cafe table in Paris.

Though inflation and the development of the modern news­paper have changed the economy of the news, the modern cafe continues to be a platform for political and literary criticism and debate. It sometimes serves the functions that formerly resided in the church, university and town square. Intellectual life, according to Richard Le Gallienne (From a Paris Garret) in 1936, moved to public cafes: "These wildly-lit cafes, turbulent and tumultuous, are the direct descendants of the cloisters of Notre-Darne and Sainte­Genevieve." Political life also fomented there: one of the speeches that precipitated the fall of the Bastille was delivered outside the Cafe Foy in the Palais-Royal; during the Algerian war, anti-Gaullist students spilled out of the cafes of St-Germain-des-Pres, pulled cobblestones from the street and hurled them at elegant cars passing in the street.

That the cafe is a literary as well as a political forum, you will see in the specific descriptions that follow. Sisley Huddleston, an English journalist in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, said that the cafe in France is the "forcing ground of art and literature." According to Roger Shattuck (The Banquet Years), Impressionism was "the first artistic movement entirely organized in cafes"-cafes such as the Nouvelle Athenes and the Guerbois. The Dada movement began in a Zurich cafe with 'Iristan Tzara, Editors of the little magazines of the 1920s "went to the Dome in search of contributors," writes American critic Malcolm Cowley. "It was easier than writing
letters ... for, in addition to its other functions, the Dome was an over-the-table market that dealt in literary futures." The cafe as literary forum is best seen in the life of [ean-Paul Sartre, the leading intellectual of his time in France. Sartre, who insisted on the public role of the writer, used the cafe for political exchange of ideas. Unlike any other country, all of French culture is concentrated in one city, Paris. Everyone reads the same papers and goes to the same cafes, where issues of culture and politics are debated on neutral ground.

The cafe also plays a role in business and commerce. Here vendors sell their newspapers, magazines, shoddy art and knick­knacks; even prostitutes parade their goods. Sinclair Lewis claims that "there were a few professional prostitutes to be found at the Dome or the Select, no matter how competent were some of the amateurs." On a more serious note, cafes are the best place for business and professional meetings: they are open long hours, food and drink are available, and they can be found in numerous convenient locations. In Paris, when one calls a friend or business associate to arrange a meeting, the first thought is to choose a central cafe. It is a public place, conducive to waiting, with a vantage point on the city and the promise of some diversion should the meeting be delayed.
Finally, cafe-sitting has great entertainment value. The cafe is theater and fashion. It is Kiki with her colorful face make-up; it is [osephine Baker strolling the aisles of La Coupole with a cheetah; it is Salvador Dali with curled mustache and cape sweeping into the Select. It is also sport. Back when the Dome was a dingy place, it had a billiard room; chess has always been played inside the Select; and tea dancing was integral to the life of La Coupole.

Cafe-sitting affords another sport worth mentioning. People­watching from a cafe is the national pastime in France as is baseball in the United States. The field for this sport is important: one must choose the ground carefully, seeking comfortable surroundings near a busy street or intersection, just the right amount of sun, and enough loose change for at least one coffee. The best players choose a good sight-line both to pedestrians and to their fellow players. The object of the game is to identify passersby, by nationality and profession. Americans were once the easiest to recognize because of their broad stride and innocent faces. Professional people-watchers can quickly surmise entire life stories. There is only one rule in this game: never be caught staring.

A final word about change and time, provoked by the loud laments protesting the destruction of La Coupole in 1988. Cafes live and die or renew themselves now as always. Most of the cafes presented in this book have undergone a succession of transforma­tions, and with each the habitues have deplored the change. Hemingway returned to Paris in 1924 to find La Closerie des Lilas tarted up, and the waiters without their mustaches. He was chagrined. Harold Steams, one of the most notorious American newspapermen in Paris in the 1920s, remembers when the Dome was an old-fashioned corner bistro, the Select an old furniture shop, La Coupole a coal-and-wood yard, the Dingo a tiny workmen's cafe, and the Rotonde the "small and dirty and historical" place where Trotskv hung out. One newspaperman remarked in 1933 that he had seen the Coupole expand over the quarter "like a mushroom," the Select "go Oscar Wilde and the Rotonde Nordic," and the Dome evolve from "an ugly wart" to an "American bar .... I've seen it all." When change occurs, remember that the visuals are transitory and the ugly new red plush will eventually fade; the spirit of the cafe, where one is welcome each day and can work or meet friends, is perpetual, if not eternal. The popularity of individual cafes has always waxed and waned; as one cafe becomes a favorite, another is declared "dead"; and the rhythm continues.

The cafes discussed in the following pages are all alive today.
Some of the great old cafes that have disappeared will be mentioned in the brief introductions to the districts where they were. Cafes associated with only one writer are not included: Gide's favorite Restaurant des Sainrs-Peres, Samuel Beckett's Cafe de l'Arrivee where he wrote Proust in 1931, Adamov's Old Navy Bar where he spent every day from 1964 to 1967, John Dos Passos's Au Rendezvous des Mariniers (now gone) on the Quai d'Anjou, and Colette's Grand Vefour. Nor are places such as Maxim's which, though used in the setting of several plays and musicals, is chiefly a society restaurant. Other cafes are fixed only in fiction, such as Cafe Momus in Henri Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Bolieme, which inspired Puccini's opera, La Boheme (1896). A handful of bars and restaurants rich in literary history are discussed briefly among the cafes.